From November 27th to December 4th, a meeting will take place, that will see the participation of more than 600 women and men communicators, who are committed in the mission of communicating about female religious life.

The First International Meeting on Communication in Religious Life will take place from November 27th to 30th in an online form and, both online and in presence, on December 4th at the UISG headquarters: This is going to be a week of events that will be animated by the three key words: Formation – Networking – Change.

Religious life needs communication-related professional formation, to empower the sisters and lay people who work in the field of communication, with a special focus on digital communication; to this end, we advocate for the strengthening of the network that connects all people working for this mission at the service of religious life, and we also wish to produce a change towards a more effective and efficient communication.

Our week of events will be based on three pivotal moments:

• 13 formation workshops, in which approximately 1000 people will participate;
• 2 full days of work, entirely dedicated to women and men communicators, whose aim will be the drafting of a joint statement, to hopefully project us towards a future in communication that will be more effective and Gospel-inspired; this statement is going to be publicly presented and released on December 4th, during the Meeting’s closing event;
• 3 roundtables on some of the key topics of the communication field, in which more than 600 people will participate.

The topics of all workshops and roundtables, as well as the multimedia resources that can be found in the “Communicating Religious Life” digital platform, have been selected by means of some joint decisions, that were made on the Delibera platform, a tool for collaborative intelligence that provides groups interactions with a technological support.

On December 4th, closing day of the International Meeting, the document ‘Sisters Communicate’ will officially be presented, including the results of a survey that the UISG Communication Office carried out on a sample of more than 300 female congregations on the topic of the current reality of communication.

The results of the survey provide us with some interesting data:

• According to 86.4% of respondents, the congregation’s communication is a task of the sisters who belong to the congregation itself; 13.6% of institutes entrust communication tasks to a lay person, who does not belong to the institute;
• 29.2 % of the responding institutes do not have a dedicated communication team, whereas 70.8% of respondents state to have one;
• 54.1% of the responding institutes have no relationship with press organizations, whereas 45.9% of respondents say they have;
• 58% of congregations do not have a communication strategic plan, contrary to some 42% of institutes which stated to have one;
• 65% of congregations devoted no part of their ratio formationis to institutional and digital communication, meaning that their initial formation does not include digital education and literacy.

These data face us with many important issues, that we will discuss about during the International Meeting, together with the many protagonists of these challenges: these are General Superiors and councilors, but also the lay people and experts who work in the field of communication in the Church, as well as in universities, communication associations and firms, and press organizations.

“This meeting is a dream coming true, a dream that we have been nourishing ever since the UISG Communication Office was created, back in 2015. Over the years, we have been working tirelessly to reach this goal, with a special focus on the formation and empowerment of the sisters who consider communication as an actual mission and believe that communicating means working for their mission. For the future, we hope that every congregation will appoint a sister as their digital missionary, with the task of strengthening communion and supporting their digital community.”  
This is what Patrizia Morgante, Coordinator of the “Communicating Religious Life” project, has declared, concerning the International Meeting.